Securing an organization's data is vital. In fact, it is quite possibly an information technology administrator's most important undertaking. Many tools have emerged to make this monumental task easier and less time-consuming. Access Control Lists (ACL) are widely used to control access to files. An ACL is basically an ordered list of rules governing data access. Configuring an access control system such as IBM's® RACF® to comply with a set of policies is an arduous task.
The standard procedure is for one or more security managers to be given a set of access control policies. These are often specified in natural language. The security manager must then use these policies to configure their organization's access control engine(s). This usually involves attempting to ensure that every relevant access request is covered by the configuration. This cumbersome task produces an access control configuration that is extremely large and complex. However, only a small percentage of access requests covered by this unwieldy configuration are ever actually received, which means that the large size and complexity of the ACL system's configuration is unnecessary.
It is also difficult, or, sometimes, impossible to determine the high level policy rules upon which a given ACL system's configuration was based. The configuration only deals with system objects, like files or applications. There are systems, like Consul, which take a given system's ACL decision logs and then provide high level translations. The drawback is that this only allows users to see the rules which were followed (based on logged access requests); it does not allow one to specify the high level rules themselves.
There is a need for an ACL system that overcomes the above-stated shortcomings of the known art.